A web form ends your sales funnel
Digital marketing budgets often go hand in hand with ROI and measurability. A large part of the total marketing budget, 16% according to The CMO Survey from August 2021 is allocated to paid media, to bring more new and recurring visitors to the website. With detailed insights available on the number of impressions, cpm, click through rates, view-ability percentages and other metrics per channel, campaign and even ad creative. Once on the website, users benefit from all the time, money and effort spent by website managers to create a user friendly brand and website experience leading them through the sales funnel. With at the end of the funnel: the web form. Either for lead generation or e-commerce.
What Google Analytics can’t see
So once the user is on the website, the tracking continues. And many companies use Google Analytics for this. Not just because this is a ‘free’ tool, but even more because of the fantastic insights where users are coming from, how they behave across the website and if they convert. Typically less than one out of a hundred users on a website convert. But just before that conversion, Google Analytics goes blind. Where Google Analytics provide all the metrics of how people behaved on your site and web pages, you get none insights about how people behaved on your web form. It’s like a dark tunnel with no visibility. Yet this is one of the most important sections of the website: it makes or breaks the ROI of your marketing investments.
Form analytics & field metrics: the blind spot mirror for Google Analytics users
With Google Analytics, the metrics between landing on a form and completing it, are simply missing. A few work arounds exists to understand for example the number of form abandoners, but that is often undoable. For example, when the website contains multiple forms, has forms embedded in content pages (instead of dedicated form pages) or when the same form is embedded on multiple content pages, the complexity is too much. And that’s the case fo almost all modern websites.
Case studies show that less than 30% of the users that land on a web form, actually start interacting with (typing in) the first field. And from the remaining 30%, the majority fails to complete the form successfully. Online forms are one of the most tricky areas of website development to get right, especially with so many things that can go wrong. In other words, there is so much to win or to loose on webforms.
Form analytics is the blind spot mirror for Google Analytics users. It’s to show the part of user behaviour on the website that’s otherwise hidden from the marketer’s vision. Form analytics and field metrics can illuminate potential problems based on quantitative data like abandon rate, hesitation time, auto-fill use etc. On the form level, as well as the field level. It’s pointing the marketer in the right direction to solve web form bottlenecks and optimisations, contributing to a significant increase of the marketing ROI.